From: Bill Kelly Date: 2006-08-28T06:51:08+09:00 Subject: Re: Why Ruby does not nead an ide From: "David Vallner" > > Hal Fulton wrote: >> MSDOS > > Hey, no touching *very* successful home gaming platforms - IIRC, the DOS > scene shined on for quite a while after Amigas fell into pitiful > stagnation. The low resource requirements and the "flexibility" that > direct everything access provided are probably to blame in a large part > for home computing as we know it today. Maybe the system didn't go the > Right Way, but it sure as hell went the Way that Worked. Apologies in advance for contributing to the [OT]ness... Background: I've used MSDOS since PC-DOS V1.0, and also got heavily into Amiga starting at V1.0... I don't think it was lack of direct access everything that killed the Amiga. The OS was an impressive marvel of simple layers with respect to hardware access. If you wanted to go lower-level, you could, legally, just peel back a layer and use lower-level access, in harmony with the rest of the OS. Windows -> Screens -> ViewPorts -> Views -> Supplying your own gfx-coprocessor display lists -> To actually requesting (borrowing) a chunk of hardware registers from the OS and giving them back (disk, blitter, copper, color, sound...) -> or, just taking over the whole system as many games did. Direct access wasn't hard on the Amiga; indeed the OS was layered so you could usually get whatever level access you needed (down to banging the hardware registers directly) without taking over the system. (But you could still take over the system easily if you wanted.) Personally what killed the Amiga in my view was bitplanes. :-) Or, more generally, that the OS was structured around a very specific gfx and sound hardware architechure that was a work of genius and a superlative feat of flexibility and economy in 1985, but which didn't scale well. On PCs, by comparison, any gfx or sound hardware (beyond the internal speaker beep) came on a plug-in card, from day one. MGA, CGA, VGA... Soundblaster... One could upgrade video and sound by plugging in a card. I was still writing Amiga games when DooM came out for the PC. One could buy an 8-bit graphics card for the PC and play DooM. There was just no practical equivalent on the Amiga... The thought of trying to implement a game like DooM in 8 or even 6 bitplanes... A nightmare. Some folks made some demos, as I recall, and they ran predictably slow. There were certainly other factors in the Amiga's demise... but I think the entrenchment of its aging hardware architecture, and the difficulty for any third party to develop a plug-in gfx or sound card that was compatible with the OS, was a huge nail in the poor platform's coffin... Haha... OK... /me reaches for Kleenex... :-) Regards, boing!